Posts Tagged: n+1

She went on to become a Siberian housewife. He went on to call for the executions of ten million Russians. But she thought back on their evenings drinking and dancing. He sang songs to her in his sweet, high voice.

Behind every dictator is a woman who sees something redeemable in him.

At n+1,Dayna Tortorici defends Elena Ferrante’s anonymity against yet another round of exposure, calling the unmaskers out for insensitivity and greed. Tortorici believes it’s all too easy to be distracted from the integrity of the book by the author’s bio and personality.

“Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his hand, scrutinizing it for false messages, bad faith, and the occasional sign of progress,” writes Daphne Merkin, in The New York Times, of n+1 co-founder Mark Greif’s essay collection, Against Everything.

Thinking about his films while watching an American film leads to a sobering realization: all the things that Kiarostami could not show in his films became the only things Hollywood filmmakers chose to show in theirs. What he showed in his films were the things abandoned by Hollywood: conversation, friendship, understanding, compassion, and empathy.

A lurid tale of sexual dishevelment, “Bobby Brown Goes Down” couldn’t get within a hundred miles of US radio but was, Zappa points out with some amusement, “the song to slow dance to in Norwegian discos.”

HELLO. I was hoping I would run into you on the elevator today. Here, this scene would be perfect for you: A young man takes an orange from the bowl in the kitchen. He sits on the couch in the living room and peels it.

In a darkly humorous new story at n+1, Jen George questions the qualifications of being “adult,” gives thirty-somethings across the world nightmares, and packs in plenty of social criticism while she’s at it. The story, “Guidance/The Party,” follows a single, childless, career-less, 33-year-old woman who is visited by a mysterious Guide.

At n+1, philosopher and writer Justin E.H. Smith remembers Jenny Diski, and shares their correspondence. For Diski, death was always the subject, the knot to admire, wryly, and attempt to untie:

…the year before her diagnosis, Jenny invokes the bleak wisdom of Beckett’s line, “Birth was the death of him.” She wonders with Nabokov why we do not worry about the infinite abyss a parte ante, before we were born.

We’ve all read at least one: from “Against YA” to “Against Happiness,” essays that promise to dismiss entire abstract concepts using only rhetoric make for great click-bait. In The New Yorker, Ivan Kreilkamp explains why we keep overstating the case:

“Against [X]” is a symptom of a liberal culture’s longing to escape its own strictures; it’s the desire of thoughtful and nuanced people to shed their inhibitions and issue fearsome dicta.

Facing financial inequality and burdened with debt, millennials have discovered Marxism, writes Timothy Shenk for the Nation. And millennial writers are leveraging technology, rejecting old guard institutions, and constructing new forums for discussion:

Combine all this with some fondness for navel gazing and with the fortunes of geography—politics aside, New York writers are New York writers, and they like to talk about each other—and the pieces are in place for the articles declaring the rebirth of Marxism that have become a minor genre in the last year.

In n+1‘s continuing examination of Amazon, Ruth Curry, co-founder of online bookstore Emily Books, looks at the relationship of the online megastore to publishers. Amazon’s entry into the publishing world was an accident:

Amazon was only incidentally a bookseller: Bezos liked books because online shoppers didn’t have to try them on or smell or measure them.

Take a break from wracking your brain about whether or not to get an MFA and go read Rumpus Pal Alexander Chee’s essay “What Getting an MFA In Fiction Meant To Me” at BuzzFeed. Chee beautifully narrates the inner debate he had with himself for many years over the decision to pursue an MFA.

Today in a Russian court, three members (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alekhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30) of the all-female Russian punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism.”

(For those unfamiliar with the story, here is a round-up of links that we published last week.)

The trio had been facing up to seven years, but, after much deliberation, was sentenced to two years in prison for an anti-Putin song they performed in a church.

Quoting writers from Alexander Pope to Jonathan Franzen, Hu argues that the apparently ever-progressing “death” of the book review is perhaps a more nuanced process than it first appears:

“Perhaps a large problem in the decline of good criticism is that readers no longer know how, or where, to find critics, and, more importantly, how to define what makes it Good.”

Hu’s essay is in some aspects a continuation of the narrative established in Elizabeth Gumport’s 2011 essay “Against Reviews” for N+1, an impassioned argument for a complete rethinking of the form and its uses.

“Over the six long months of school sit-ins, marches, unavailing efforts at dialogue, barricades, and gunshots, everything shifted and is still shifting, an unending moral earthquake in a country that seemed to have turned away from great moral questionings, the pain of the dictatorship, the urgency of reconciliation.”

WRITE YOUR STORY reads the advertising placard for corporate octopus Citibank on display in the Union Square subway station in Manhattan. The campaign’s thrust appears to be this: by spending money, being a consumer, one, in fact, indites a story on the face of the everyday. ...more

This n+1 piece tracks the history of conversation, in different mediums. The vastly diverging worlds of talking vs. conversation vs. chatting online have all experienced their own evolution. Even just focusing on chat itself reveals a trajectory perpetually informed by the ways in which we chat online.

Lutz writes “Taste cultures do have something to do with circles of intimates, and the explosion of book clubs in recent years is testimony to a general desire for, if not an orgy, at least something more personal and embodied than a Sunday book supplement.

Best known for his book Murdered by Capitalism and his coverage of the Zapatistas movement in Mexico, where he spent a significant portion of his life, Ross wandered the globe from San Francisco to Peru to Iraq, documenting his insurrectionist journeys.

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Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, short fiction, and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you, as readers, commenters or future contributors, to do the same. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). (more)